Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 173
No Better
Felecia didn’t spend much time near the water anymore. She had no fear of meeting the monster out in the waves once again, and what nightmares she had about her relatives returning, half eaten from the sea had come and gone. No, the aversion to the sea had more to do with loss than fear as time went on. The rest of the world laid out beyond the waters, so many places Felecia had read about and knew she would never see. In any direction Felecia chose to swim or take a boat she would be someplace other than Aquidneck.
Memories of childhood nonsense, ugly reminiscing over swearing to Phillip that she would find someone in the village who would teach her how to work aboard a boat. Pointless hopes of following in her fathers and her brothers footsteps. No, there was no point in walking by or staring overlong at the waves beyond the shore.
And hardly the time either.
Clarence had made it through the winter, if just barely, and Felecia brought the bastard a wild sow she had managed to trap out in the woods and the piglets were running wild now. The fields were planted and only time would tell what, if anything, would manage to grow. The goats, yes goats, numbered four with hopefully another two or three on the way. The chickens laid enough eggs to keep a half a dozen in the larder at any given time. Soon there would be animals to trade in earnest and maybe even enough produce to sell in town.
Felecia never considered the possibility of being a farmer, or a rancher growing up, the village had precious little of that and what was managed from the household barn was always solely the propriety of Phillip and beyond Felecia’s purview as a child. Every step along the way had been was trial and error, and mostly error and overall, Felecia despised the endless day in and day out of it all. There was sustenance with success, which is necessary sure, but even the victories of her life now seemed somehow small and even ugly.
From sun up to sun down was surrendered to the animals, the fields, building and repairing this and that. Then came Phillip and Taryn, one required nearly all her extra labor and the other the entirety of her patience and it was anyone’s guess who would require what measure from her on any given day.
Since the downturn, Phillip never had a day as whole to himself and yet as otherworldly and terrifying as the day Felecia came to find the monster out in the waves in control of him, body and mind. Phillip’s time was spent mostly as Felecia had come upon him when she returned before, muttering to himself or drooling while fast asleep in front of the embers of the hearth he had built with his own two hands before Taryn was a glint an anyone’s eye.
Taryn was easier to manage but nearly impossible to understand. The youth continued, once his pride had mended, unabashed and unbothered by Felecia’s continued strain with their every encounter. He could be charming, but almost only when he wasn’t trying to be, he could be honest and disarming, almost alluring but again, only when he was tired, or downtrodden, or busy making the most of his own horrors of the moment.
At nearly every turn the things that crawled forward with Felecia’s misgivings about him where the things that had always kept her at bay. First and foremost, beyond Taryn’s control and hopes, Taryn was a man. Beyond his sex or what he did as a person to keep appearances or no, Taryn acted and truly was, a man. Felecia wasn’t attracted to men, she loathed that aspect of herself and hid it away for years but even as time washed away her own childish misgivings about her orientations, she was loved and, in a way, loved herself, a man, trapped in a woman’s body. Taryn was still a bad fit, the only person on the island likely to love her, and love her he absolutely did with every fiber, but still…did that require a return?
Was there ever going to be something better waiting for Felecia Conway? After all she had endured and outlived? No. The obvious and always answer was no. She didn’t have to love Taryn back, but she knew and would always know that there would be no other person to love her so.